Hitachi, BlueArc Move Into NAS Midrange

Hitachi Data Systems and BlueArc are moving their relationship down market with new midrange NAS offerings.

BlueArc's year-old OEM relationship with HDS has been a strong one. According to a recent SEC filing in support of its IPO plans, BlueArc said its sales more than doubled to $32.3 million in the six months ended July 31  and 39 percent of those revenues came courtesy of Hitachi.

Now the two hope to duplicate that high-end NAS success in the midrange, going up against the likes of Network Appliance and EMC with new offerings.

BlueArc dubs the new offering the Titan 1100, with pricing starting at $75,000, while Hitachi is calling it the NAS Platform 2000 and the NAS Platform 2000 Nearline, with added features that more than double the cost.

The Titan 1100 and NAS Platform 2000 offers support for two-node clustering and can scale up to 128 terabytes of data while offering 50,000 IOPS performance. It also features the same software, data management and protection and virtualization capabilities of BlueArc's high-end line line.

Hitachi is positioning the 2000 Nearline as disk-to-disk storage for a secondary site or large data repository, scaling up to 2 petabytes of SATA storage.

Hitachi is also offering greater integration with the Hitachi HiCommand storage management software suite, so users can combine the file-based virtualization framework with the block-based virtualization framework provided by the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V series. The new NAS platforms also support synchronous replication with Hitachi TrueCopy software and local clone support with Hitachi ShadowImage Heterogeneous Replication software.

HDS is also offering a MetroCluster long-distance replication solution in partnership with Ciena, with an active-active GeoCluster up to 100 kilometers, and Hitachi also added greater security for virtual servers.